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 WORKSHOPS
Join Your Peers for Three Days of Focused Discussion
- Senior system administrators will want to participate in one or more of these all-day workshops. Attendance is limited for each workshop, which ensures a seminar-like atmosphere.
- To attend a workshop, you must be an accepted workshop participant. See each workshop's description for its participation details. To register for a workshop, be sure to check the Workshop Participant box on the first page of the registration form.
Workshops Schedule
SUNDAY:
Fighting Spam |
MicroLISA |
Business-Driven IT Management |
Practical Configuration Management
MONDAY:
University Issues |
ZFS |
Government and Military System Administration
TUESDAY:
Advanced Topics |
Server Room Best Practices | Virtual Infrastructures
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Sunday, November 9
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Workshop 1: Fighting Spam: The State of the Art
Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan University
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Fighting spam is unique for two reasons: First, since spam pits the
system administrator against a human foe, the landscape changes very
frequently; second, the approach most people take to fighting spam is
one of layers, where, through the combination of a number of tools,
they can filter the good from the bad.
Consequently, though, keeping up with the new techniques,
counter-techniques, tools, intelligence, and approaches can itself be
a full-time job. The goal of this workshop is for every participant
to come away with an updated arsenal for fighting spam, whether it's a
tool that makes their existing setup quicker or easier; a concept they
can develop into another arrow in their quiver; or an entirely new
layer to fight the latest spamming techniques.
Contact lisa08ws-spam@usenix.org to participate.
Workshop 2: MicroLISA
Robert Au
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
System administrators at very small sites, those with at most a few IT
staff, face some unique technical and organizational challenges. Small
teams generally assign broader responsibilities to each member; users and
management have more exposure to front-line workers, and vice versa; and
the organizational environment often limits budget and manpower stringently.
This workshop will provide both full-time administrators and consultants
with a forum to discuss and explore solutions to those challenges.
Some techniques and technologies, such as clustering, configuration
management, and batch queueing systems, are more common in large sites, which have more complex needs and can leverage greater resources and specialization. These approaches may still be worthwhile in smaller sites,
if their value outweighs the often proportionally higher learning,
implementation, and maintenance costs. Other problems, like backup,
restore, and disaster recovery, require significantly different solutions
at small sites.
At small sites, sysadmins without the word "manager" in their titles often
must take on managerial duties and decisions, such as choosing the
appropriate people with which to build a staff, aligning IT goals with
organizational goals, and ensuring their own career development. Lack of
purchasing power may make vendor negotiations more difficult, and lack of
manpower may make emergency coverage run the risk of burnout.
To participate, contact lisa08ws-microlisa@usenix.org.
Workshop 3: Business-Driven IT Management (Half-Day Morning)
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs Palo Alto
9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
How do we align IT systems with the needs of a business or other organization? This question was first asked as a research problem surprisingly recently. It is not as easy to answer as we might expect. Often system administration is completely decoupled from business objectives, once a list of requirements has been delivered. Can we do better than this? What about corporate requirements such as SOX and "best practices" such as ITIL?
In this half-day workshop we shall present a few of the ideas that have emerged from the successful BDIM conferences and open for a discussion by practitioners interested in sharing and contributing to the understanding of this interesting problem. Sign up for a frank exchange of ideas, or come and present your particular dilemma or solution.
Contact lisa08ws-bdim@usenix.org to participate.
Workshop 4: Practical Configuration Management (Half-Day Afternoon)
Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory
1:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.
Discussion in this workshop will cover comparative analysis of current tools, including Puppet, BCFG2, Cfengine, LCFG, and others, including a practitioner's perspective on using these tools. The goal of the workshop is to provide tool developers and practitioners with a forum for discussing practice, comparing tools, and outlining functional desires. Attendees should be tool developers or advanced system administrators experienced in automation and configuration management. Prospective attendees should send a single paragraph describing why they would like to attend the workshop and what they hope to get out of it to lisa08ws-cm@usenix.org to participate.
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Monday, November 10
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Workshop 5: University Issues
John "Rowan" Littell, California College of the Arts; Adele Shakal, University of Southern California
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
The focus of this workshop is on issues peculiar to university and
college computing shops. Schools vary greatly in their approach to
running computing infrastructures. The differences can stem from the
general culture of the school as well as upper management, or even from
departmental versus institution-wide services.
Part of the goal of this workshop is to communicate what works and what
does not work for your institution or your organization within the
institution. Topics might include funding, student/faculty/staff needs,
research, security, purchasing, staffing, training, working with
students, working with research and instructional staff, and even the
culture and campus integration of computing facilities and support.
To attend the workshop, please send email to lisa08ws-univissues@usenix.org with a short paragraph describing your institution, the biggest issue you face today, or something about your institution that works particularly well or that others might want to consider for their own school. You can also include topics you would like to see on the workshop agenda.
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Workshop 6: ZFS
Richard Elling, Sun Microsystems
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
This workshop aims to help system administrators become proficient at managing the ZFS file system. We will discuss how to plan for use of disk storage, data protection, redundancy, failure modes, fault detection and repair, performance, backup and restore, hierarchical data storage, integration with other storage services, clustering, and tips, tricks, and gotchas.
To register for the workshop, please send your reasons for wishing to attend the workshop and any specific subjects you'd like covered or questions to be answered to lisa08ws-zfs@usenix.org.
Workshop 7: Government and Military System Administration
Andrew Seely, Science Applications International Corporation
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
This workshop will be an opportunity for system administrators responsible for government and military systems to discuss common challenges, problems, solutions, and information unique to the government sector. Participants will gain and share insight into the broad range of government system administration requirements and will benefit from making contacts in related fields. The workshop will also be an opportunity to assess interest in creating a special interest group dedicated to government-sector system administration.
Are you the system administrator responsible for computing systems owned by government or military agencies? The sysadmin who works in secure environments, deals with classified data, provides GOTS support, and deploys to the latest military hotspots? If so, then this workshop is for you. Discussion topics will include common technical problems and solutions unique to government computing, effectiveness of contract, civil service, and uniformed sysadmins, general employment issues, DoD regulation 8570.01-M, challenges of working across multiple security domains, deployed sysadmin, and more.
To attend, send email to lisa08ws-gov@usenix.org with a brief description of your areas of interest/experience.
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Tuesday, November 11
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Workshop 8: Advanced Topics
Adam Moskowitz, Permabit Technology Corp.
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
This workshop, intended for very senior administrators, provides an informal roundtable discussion of the problems facing system administrators today. Attendance is limited and based on acceptance of a position paper (plain ASCII, three paragraphs maximum); a typical paper covers what the author thinks is the most difficult or important issue facing system administrators today, why this is a problem, and why this problem is important. More information about the workshop and about position papers can be found here; position papers should be sent to lisa08ws-atw@usenix.org. Attendees are required to bring a laptop computer.
Workshop 9: Server Room Best Practices
Hunter Matthews, Duke University
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
This workshop, intended for mid-level and advanced sysadmins,
is intended to share best practices between sites and to try to predict
changes that will affect those best practices. A definite topic this year will be "green" trends, that is, newer cooling techniques and power efficiencies.
Attendance is limited to people with at least some experience in this
area and who need to specify and build data centers as part
of their jobs.
To attend, send email to lisa08ws-serverrm@usenix.org with a brief description of your areas of interest/experience and indicate whether you would be prepared to make a short presentation.
Workshop 10: Virtual Infrastructures
Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Phil Huber, XCalibre Communications
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
There has recently been a strong trend toward virtualization. VLANs overlay the physical network infrastructure, physical machines host multiple virtual machines, and storage arrays provide virtual disks. Changes in the architecture no longer require physical intervention: the capacity of the virtual machines, their attached disks, and their network connections can all be changed by software. This brings huge benefits—for example, it allows a data center to adapt quickly to varying demands, and it makes efficient use of the available cycles (and hence of power). But it adds a new dimension to the challenge of infrastructure management. The area is evolving rapidly and it is difficult to keep abreast of new developments.
This workshop will provide a forum for exchanging the latest ideas and experiences. There will be a mixture of short presentations and informal discussions. Applications are welcome from anyone with practical experience or research interests in the area. Active participation will be expected.
To attend, send email to lisa08ws-virtu@usenix.org with a brief description of your interest/experience in the area and a short list of topics/issues you would like to see discussed. Please also indicate if you would be interested giving a short (15-minute) presentation on a particular topic. (Please note that there may not be any response to applications before September.) See http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/group/lssconf/iWeb/lssconf/2008.html for updates and further details.
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